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About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Infantry Magazine, Military Review, Naval Institute Proceedings, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
Another archived site is here.
It replaces the ".com" with ".ws".
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Sunday, May 15, 2016

The Reality-Based Nation

Let's recall how socialism can wreck a country even when it sits on a sea of oil to pay for all the government you want.

Police and National Guard killed four suspects Tuesday during a wide raid in Western Caracas that involved tanks and helicopters, as Venezuela also underwent the rare climate phenomenon known as a “solar halo.”

“As has been the request of our people, we have deployed OLP New Phase in 4 areas of Caracas,” tweeted Interior Minister Gustavo Gonzalez as the operation began unfolding. Local media said eight suspected criminals were killed during the operation, but Gonzalez spoke only of four killed when resisting police action. Some 400 vehicles were used during the operation, ranging from motorcycles to tanks and choppers.

And we have a side bonus of how socialism must twist words to hide reality:

For the first time ever, tanks were deployed in one of Caracas’ few “zonas de paz”, or “peace zones” -- Cota 905.

Like the OLP itself, the “peace zones” are a divisive, highly controversial initiative: high-crime areas were police stopped patrolling three years ago, after talks with local gangs. Now the cops are back and in full force.

Let's ignore the fact that socialism didn't spread out enough goodies to reduce crime. So much for that root cause.

Let's enjoy the full 1984 scope of the terminology: Peace zones! That is, no-go zones for the police that left the people at the mercy of criminal gangs.

Apparently, a Venezuelan version of Ben Rhodes works for Venezuela's socialist government.

Thank goodness Bush 43 didn't support a coup early in his term to keep Hugo Chavez from taking over and imposing the most bizarre form of socialism on Venezuela, and leave his hapless successor to be the guy who sends in the troops.

With dire shortages of basic goods, a looming foreign debt payment, horrific street crime and intransigent political divisions, Venezuela is in danger of collapsing into waves of deadly violence, U.S. intelligence officials warned Friday.

We don't have enough problems around the world and now we have to face the prospect of a country in our hemisphere exploding.

But this is possibly better than I worried about when I called Venezuela under Chavez the lead member of the "Axis of El Vil (the vile)" perhaps seeking promotion to the Axis of Evil. I didn't suspect that Chavez and his successor could destroy oil-rich Venezuela so rapidly before the big promotion.

Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.

But that is so three years ago when other people's money was still available.

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.